A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Bostic v. Rainey

In attempt to prove that Virginia is indeed for lovers, two couples have recently gone to federal court to get their marriages recognized in their home state. One of the couples has been together for more than 20 years and the other got married in California and have a teenage daughter together, yet the Commonwealth of Virginia will not recognize their marriages because the couples are—you guessed it—same-sex. These couples don’t see why their sexual orientation should keep them from enjoying the equal right to marry a partner of their choice, so they filed suit in federal district court to challenge the Virginia’s anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendment. They argued that the provision violates both equal protection and the fundamental right to marriage, as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. This February, the district court agreed with them, and now they’re defending that ruling before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Following on the heels of last term’s Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Windsor—which struck down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that denied federal benefits to lawfully married same-sex couples—this case adds Virginia to the list of states (which now includes Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio, and seems to grow with each passing week) that have the constitutionality of their marriage laws before a federal appeals court. Reprising our collaboration in Perry v. Hollingsworth—the California Prop 8 case in which the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the merits—and the Tenth Circuit gay marriage cases Kitchen v. Herbert and Bishop v. Smith, Cato and the Constitutional Accountability Center have filed a brief supporting the plaintiffs’ fight for equality under the law in the Old Dominion. We argue that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause protects against the arbitrary and invidious singling-out that the Virginia gay marriage ban effects, that the clause’s original meaning confirms that its protections are to be interpreted broadly, and that the clause provides every person the equal right to marry a person of his or her choice. We believe that the Virginia constitutional amendment conflicts with the equal rights of those same-sex couples whose unions are treated differently than those of opposite-sex couples. To the extent that states recognize marriage, every person has the right to choose whom to marry and to have that decision respected equally by the state in which they live. Especially in the wake of Windsor, it is becoming clearer that laws that force same-sex unions into second-class status have no place in a free society. The Fourth Circuit should affirm the district court’s decision.